Just Wait Until the Next One

Now there’s going to be plenty of talk about Sonia Sotomayor, so anything I can add can wait, or be skipped all together. But I will make just one single prediction.

Selecting her for the Supreme Court is President Obama’s way of ticking off two emblems of his American Victims constituency, (ethnics, women). The aim is populating the court not with top jurists, but representatives of American victim groups whose voices need to be embroidered into, or over, the Constitution.

Except with Judge Sotomayor, Obama's already running out of identity groups. That's why I'm convinced his next choice for Supreme Court is going to be a homosexual. A fully out, practicing homosexual, naturally, so we won't fail to get the full benefit of his (or her) rich experiences.

All the rhetoric now about Judge Sotomayor the Latina woman judicial pioneer can just as well be applied to a queer nominee: the compelling life story, the rich experience, (eeeeeww) how America's finally turning a page, how the nominee's "community" has a long history of discrimination -- even Chuck Schumer's shirty (brownshirty, that is) threats that anyone who criticizes the choice will do so at his own peril. All the stuff we've learned to love about being silenced by the gay rights movement.

With that in mind, I suppose President Obama could select a Muslim, too, for all the same reasons. Not that there's anything unConstitutional about selecting a Muslim, (what can I say, with all those Catholics on the bench?). Any more than there's anything wrong with selecting a Latina, or a woman. What I don't like is choices based on the Supreme Court as a representative political body making policy instead of a deliberative juridical body safeguarding the Constitution with good old abstract legal theories and a pithy footnote in a casebook or two.